Reviewed: May 2014

Another ‘third edition’. I likes the first edition so much that I’ve also bought both the 2nd and 3rd editions. However, I’ve downgraded my rating a bit. This isn’t so much a reflection on any lowering in the quality of the book as an indication that I feel that the relative quality of available information on the internet has improved.

This edition is updated to cover more recent UNIX (and clone) systems and standards. Whilst the versions of Linux used was reasonably up to date when the book was being written (presumably 2012), I was a bit disappointed to see that the versions of FreeBSD (8.2), Solaris (10) and Mac OS X (10.6.8) were already a bit old. Standards-wise, there are a lot of updates to cover the Single UNIX Specification, version 4 (SUSv4). The main changes that I noted were the removal of STREAMS (though Rago does seem rather nostalgic and mentions it in passing several times) and more of a move in style from purely Stevens to more Rago, e.g., adding more larger code examples with comments.